1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the field of spread spectrum rake receivers. More particularly, an Adaptive Generalized Matched Filter rake receiver system and method is provided that is especially well suited for use in a mobile communication device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile communication devices operate in a multi-path propagation environment, i.e., there is typically more than one propagation path from the transmitter to the receiver. In addition, the velocity of the mobile device may vary from 0 km/h (standing still) to 500 km/h (traveling in a high speed train). Therefore, the multi-path propagation environment will typically range from direct line of sight to multi-clustered, multi-path propagation with no direct line of sight spread over several microseconds. Consequently, typical mobile communication devices employ a multi-fingered rake receiver that uses simple Maximal Ratio Combining and standard pilot tracking processing in order to track the centroids of the multi-path clusters in a spread spectrum signal, such as a Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) signal.
A typical Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) rake receiver includes a plurality of fingers, each of which correlates to a different delay of an input signal. The correlator outputs from each finger are then typically weighted by a vector of complex weighting coefficients, and combined to form a decision variable. In typical MRC rake receivers, the values of the coefficients in the weighting vector are chosen without regard to the statistical correlation properties of the noise impairment in the received signal, for instance by setting each weighting coefficient as the complex conjugate of the channel impulse response. As a result, typical MRC rake receivers perform optimally when the noise corruption to the input signal is limited to Independent Additive Noise (IAN), such as Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN), which is independent of the signal transmitted to the mobile device from a base station. In typical mobile communication systems, however, multiple spread spectrum signals are transmitted at a single bandwidth, resulting in dependant noise, such as Multi-User Interference (MUI). Because typical MRC rake receivers are optimized to compensate for IAN, they are often sub-optimal when dependent noise is present.
The use of a Generalized Matched Filter (GMF) to compensate for dependant noise in a spread spectrum signal is known. For instance, a generic description of a GMF is found in Kay, “Fundamentals of statistical signal processing—detection theory,” Prentice Hall, 1998. In addition, the use of a GMF in a CDMA receiver is disclosed in G. Bottomly et al, “A generalized Rake receiver for interference suppression,” IEEE Journal on selected areas in communications, Vol. 18, No.8, August 2000. Known Generalized Matched Filters, however, require an excessive amount of processing, and are therefore not typically implemented in mobile communication devices.